Weeding. Most gardeners consider this to be one of their least favorite tasks. It can be tedious, monotonous, and thankless enough to put some people off gardening all together. Weeds grow incredibly fast and can overtake your garden seemingly overnight. They can quickly result in crop yield reductions or the death of ornamental plants. Thus, their control is essential.
But what if you do not have unlimited time or desire to pull weeds and you don’t wish to spray herbicides? Then you are in the same category as us. Today we are going to share with you some of our favorite ways to minimize the time we spend weeding.
Let’s start with a little bit of weed science
As you probably already know, many of the most troublesome weeds are annuals. They complete their life-cycle quickly and produce copious quantities of seed allowing them to aggressively colonize your gardens. What you might not realize is that many of these seeds do not germinate immediately. They become part of what is called the soil seed bank. Many weed species are very smart about survival. They may produce seeds designed to germinate immediately. They also produce seeds that can stay in the soil for years and years ensuring their continued survival. These seeds sit dormant in the soil until the conditions are right for germination.
You should do everything you can to prevent weeds from going to seed in your garden.
If you can avoid adding new seeds to your soil seed bank, you can eventually draw down the quantity of seeds in the seed bank resulting in less work for you. This is why gardens that have been cultivated for may years are often far, far less work than newly created ones.
Though its so tempting to till up and immediately plant a new garden area, your future self will thank you if you wait. Spend some time, or even a whole season if possible disturbing the soil to allow weed seeds to germinate. Then till the area again to kill those seedlings and to encourage new ones to germinate. This will allow you to partially deplete the seed bank before you plant your garden.
This technique is particularly helpful for annual crops like vegetables. Many times the first season or two of a new vegetable garden sees weed pressure so aggressive it is hard to get successful crops. This can be very discouraging for a new gardener. Spending a year drawing down your seed bank and amending the soil prior to trying to grow a garden can be very advantageous to helping you set yourself up for success.
Keep in mind that this technique can also be useful for new ornamental beds. Perennial lawn grasses can be very tenacious and difficult to eradicate after your ornamentals have been planted. Taking the time to make sure they are dead and gone before planting can save you a lot of headache.
Once your plants are planted then what?
Let’s go back to our weed science again. When we do, we learn that our land has a carrying capacity. A given square foot of soil can only support so many plants. Only so much surface area of plant leaf per surface area of soil is possible. And weeds know this. Many weed seeds will not germinate, or will not survive past germination if they are shaded or crowded by other plants. You want to make sure your plants are the ones monopolizing the carrying capacity. The trick here is two-fold. Don’t leave open soil, and make sure your crops are big enough to have the competitive advantage.
Usually this means that you have to be diligent about weed control early in the season. Weed seeds often germinate faster and also grow more rapidly than desirable plants. You want to suppress the weeds long enough that your desired plants can close their canopy–that is cover the entire soil surface with their leaves. Once they have done that you should have significantly less weeding to do the remainder of the season.
One way we take advantage of this concept is through using mulch.
Using a traditional mulch like wood chips works very well in some settings like ornamental beds, or on perennial crops like our brambles and asparagus. Mulch blocks light to the soil and tricks weed seeds into not growing, or buries them deeply enough that they die before making it to the surface. In order for mulch to be effective, it has to be thick, and you have to prevent weed seeds from being dropped on its surface.
Unfortunately, for annual crops and areas that are tilled and replanted frequently mulch tends to add a ton of work we’d rather not do. This is because you cannot for example till 4” of bark mulch into your soil every year and expect to have a good garden. Nor can you expect your vegetable seeds to grow through mulch. Once you disturb the mulch layer and mix a small amount of soil with it in the process you lose much of the protective effect. Thus, to really benefit you the mulch would need to be removed and new mulch applied every year.
There are more viable alternatives to bark mulch. You can use more readily degraded organic materials such as grass clippings or straw to mulch vegetable gardens as these materials can be more readily tilled into the soil at the end of the year. Many gardeners do so with great success. We however do not have access to suitable grass clippings and find straw expensive and labor intensive to use.
We much prefer to use living mulch to suppress weeds in our garden.
Living mulch can take many forms. It is simply using a desirable plant to crowd out weeds. In our ornamental beds around the house we allow our favorite re-seeding annuals to fill in gaps between our perennials. The result is that they squeeze out most weeds. Despite not heavily mulching those beds we have very little weeding to do throughout the growing season. Plus, our perennials thank us for not smothering them. While woody shrubs typically tolerate heavy mulching well, most herbaceous perennials do not. Using living mulch allows our perennials to flourish without the weeding that would typically accompany not having mulched beds.
In our vegetable garden there are equally as many choices for living mulches. Some people like to use fast growing salad greens like spinach or lettuce. Our personal favorite living mulch is sweet potato vines. They are extremely effective at covering bare soil quickly. Plus the entire plant is edible and useful on our farm, so nothing goes to waste. The big advantage we feel sweet potato vines have over thing like lettuce or Phacelia is that they will spread and fill in all the gaps whereas a seeded crop won’t move from where you planted it. We find that living mulch is more effective and less labor intensive than any kind of organic mulch we have tried.
Our last tip to make your garden weeding task easier is a tool rather than a technique.
We have not found a tool that makes quicker work of weeding than a stirrup hoe. It is the one tool we would not want to be without in our garden. If you have not tried one we would encourage you to do so. Our stirrup hoe allows us to weed in hours what would have taken days to do by hand. Plus, the more you stirrup hoe your garden the easier your weeding gets. Done regularly you will kill almost all the weeds as tiny seedlings.
Many people look at stirrup hoes and can’t immediately understand how they can be of so much benefit. However, these hoes are designed to run just under the surface of the soil cutting everything off. They are sharpened on the front and back side of the blade allowing you to cut on the push and pull stroke (if the head oscillates). You can rapidly chop down weeds of all sizes with minimal soil disturbance.
The lack of soil disturbance means that you can safely use the hoe right next to your plants. Using this hoe you can rapidly weed large areas reserving the tedious individual weed pulling for right around the base of your plants. We find this hoe makes such quick work of weeding our garden that we can zip through and weed the entire thing frequently. The weeds don’t get a chance to get ahead of us.
We hope that this quick glimpse into weed biology and how we manage weeds on our farm helps you to get ahead of the weeds in your garden this year!
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